Our Theme in English
Ms. X gestures to the wall-
There, against the velcro,
It twists and warps.
"It is not what happens to us".
Those lines, that geneology,
Of water-colour, smeared,
Surely saved by those bright colours?
"Darling little wishbone",
"Thiefish in the dark",
"The drowned bay".
The mangroves and the blur of the streets,
Careening around the sun.
When did I learn the scale of it?
That, to go from room to room,
Is to cross a world entire?
"The man who never reads lives only one".
"I think she knew it. Sitting at her dressing table that night, somewhere beneath her smooth expression, she knew it."
So far away, through those doorways, the veil between, above those thin stairs.
Buried six feet under, how would you breathe?
The bannister wasnt fixed at the base,
The balcony supports rusted through.
"I found him on the bedroom floor",
"Glazed and gazing, by the door".
Over the fence, denim fibres on barbed wire,
Under those pines in the dark, in the wind, in the rain.
In pitch, up to your shoulders, how would you swim?
Who are we,
"But what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness"?